@ sixes & sevens

The almighty comma

It's clear to me now that I have my mother to blame for my love of language in all its aspects.

At the drop of a hat she would repeat an anecdote that stressed the importance of the lowly comma. The fact that the tale was bawdy, the punchline turning on a double-entendre, only added luster to the lesson and would always brought a gleam to her eye. Consider, she would say, what becomes of the innocuous Cole Porter standard entitled "What is this thing called love?" Add a comma, and it becomes "What is this thing called, love?" Somehow I understood the altered title was meant to allude to the sex organs.

Listening recently to an episode "Selected Shorts", I was reminded of the almighty comma during a typically stentorian reading from a work of literature. In this case, however, the narrator gave no clue to the context and I really wasn't certain which reading was correct.

Here is the same sentence punctuated in two ways with vastly different meanings:

He just wanted her lying there.

He just wanted her, lying there.

+ + + + + + + +

Postscript: Isn't the Internet marvelous? Using just this sentence I managed to find a single Google result that answered not only how to read (and punctuate) the sentence but cites the source. The story, "Red," is by Maile Meloy and collected in her Half In Love.

The episode of Selected Shorts is mentioned here. The story is read by Keith Szarabajka (right).

Wharton's wordplay

By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life ...

This from an Edith Wharton story, "The Eyes," to which I was listening happily over a podcast of "Selected Shorts". (Luckily you can read the entire story online here.) Wharton's prose, I was reminded, has a real love of words nestled in it. Sometimes it's a bit dense, and you find yourself lulled into not listening to the words until a word or phrase suddenly leaps out at you.

In this instance I was reminded of an ancient New Yorker cartoon. ... caption, "He says he's just an observer of the passing scene."

Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural grace -- it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless animal.

and a little farther on:

He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.

To this genius for capturing a turn of phrase is added a few queer word nuggets, just enough out-of-place to catch your attention but not so opaque as to cause your attention to stumble, at least not for more than a phrase or two, never for an entire sentence. (I am likely to stop the iPod or to scramble for my cell phone that I can leave myelf a note.) The trait is a variation of what reading Shakespeare becomes, where the endless variations in words (using one part of speech for another, as an adjective for a noun, or a by now obsolete form of a word) can make the reading both rewarding and frustrating at once.

Here are just two words that caught my ear in "The Eyes": dupery and hyacinthine. I'll leave it to you to find these words buried in the story.

And on and on it goes. This post was still in draft when I caught yet another Selected Shorts" podcast, reading this time from Wharton's "The Debt". Early on Wharton engages in another one of her sidelong characterizations. The victim this time, ultimately to find retribution, is one Galen Dregde:

He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.

Sentences that make you sit up

Shirtless, I lie on short grass. Its texture tickles my back. My companion, swimming, leaves me to my lonely thinking. (Once we shared summer ruminations. At times our silences run parallel. At others we're like strangers who don't meet.)

"Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda," from Insomnia, by Aamer Hussein. (italics supplied)

Sentences that make you sit up

I had been mulling a post recently but hesitated to follow through. Thanks to a lunch with my comrade-in-blogs, Dan, when I mentioned the idea in passing and received his endorsement and amplification, I'm putting up what will certainly be the first of many chosen sentences.

This one appears early on in Qui Xiaolong's A Loyal Character Dancer, a police procedural set in modern-day China. Our protagonist, Chief Inspector Chen, is examining a body found in Shanghai's Bund Park:

He pulled up the dead man's eyelid--a bloodshot eye stared at the sky, which was dappled with clouds.

Most of this is the stuff of all police procedurals, a genre I admit I spend an inordinate amount of time reading. What made me sit up was the sudden shift in point of view as we pivoted from the 'd.b.' to the sky. Wow. I couldn't help but be reminded of all the art history babble I've read about how Asian art capitalizes on shifting points of view. (Qiu writes in English, by the way.)

Now, Dan is reading through Pynchon's latest, which to an outsider like myself might seem to be composed almost entirely and self-consciously of sit-up sentences. Can you winnow down your favorites to only a handful, I wonder?

Booklist

This is a running list of what I've read been reading recently. It turns out that Typepad 'lists' only show ten titles, and take up lots of room in the sidebar. It seems easier to keep a running blog post of everything I've been reading. It's soooo .... librarian!
Ed.: I'm moving post this forward to January 2007.

• Boyd, William  Any Human Heart ****
• Burdett, John  Bangkok Tattoo *** (Jan. 2007)
• Delisle, Guy  Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea *****
• Frankfurt, Harry G.  Reasons for Love
• -----. Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right *****
• Hornby, Nick  A Long Way Down ***
• Ishiguro, Kazuo  Never Let Me Go *****
• Kawabata, Yasunari  Snow Country [DNF: This one never 'spoke' to me]
• Keenan, Brigid  Diplomatic Baggage: The Advengtures of a Trailing Spouse ***
• Lescroart, John  Hunt Club *** (Jan. 2007)
• Lethem, Jonathan  Motherless Brooklyn *****
• Marquart, Debra  Horizontal World : Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere : A Memoir ****
• Murakami, Haruki  After the Quake : Stories ***** (thanks, EH!)
• Pearl, Matthew  The Dante Club : A Novel [Did not finish: Unreadable]
• Qiu Xiaolong  The Loyal Character Dancer  ***** (Jan. 2007)
• Robinson, Marilynne  Gilead *****
• Ruiz Zafon, Carlos  Shadow of the Wind ***** (thanks, Liz!)
• Saramago, Jose  Blindness ****
• Seal, Jeremy  A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat ****
• Smith, Zadie  On Beauty ***

Traveler's bookshelf: an interlude

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being. Think of our progress through time as one of those handy images that illustrate the Ascent of Man. You know the type: diagrams that begin with the shaggy ape and his ground-grazing knuckles, moving on through slowly straightening and depilating hominids, until we reach the clean-shaven Caucasian nudist proudly clutching the haft of his stone axe or spear. All the intervening orders assume a form of inevitable progression towards this brawny ideal. But our human lives aren't like that, and a true journal presents us with the more riotous and disorganized reality. The various stages of development are there, but they are jumbled up, counterposed and repeated randomly. The selves jostle for prominence in these pages: the monobrowed Neanderthal shoulders aside axe-wielding Homo sapiens; the neurasthenic intellectual trips up the bedaubed aborigine. It doesn't make sense; the logical, perceived progression never takes place. The true journal intime understands this fact and doesn't try to posit any order or hierarchy, doesn't try to judge or analyze: I am all these different people--all these people are me.

-- William Boyd, Any Human Heart: A Novel. London, Hamish & Hamilton, 2002.